Noughts and Crosses eBook

“Something pious,” Joanna answered with
an ugly little laugh, “since we want our dinner.
The public has still enough honesty left to pity
piety.” She stepped out into the middle
of the street, facing her sisters’ windows,
and began, the man’s voice chiming in at the
third bar—­

PSYCHE.

“Among these million Suns how shall the strayed
Soul find her way back to earth?”

The man was an engine-driver, thick-set and heavy,
with a short beard grizzled at the edge, and eyes
perpetually screwed up, because his life had run for
the most part in the teeth of the wind. The lashes,
too, had been scorched off. If you penetrated
the mask of oil and coal-dust that was part of his
working suit, you found a reddish-brown phlegmatic
face, and guessed its age at fifty. He brought
the last down train into Lewminster station every night
at 9.45, took her on five minutes later, and passed
through Lewminster again at noon, on his way back
with the Galloper, as the porters called it.

He had reached that point of skill at which a man
knows every pound of metal in a locomotive; seemed
to feel just what was in his engine the moment he
took hold of the levers and started up; and was expecting
promotion. While waiting for it, he hit on the
idea of studying a more delicate machine, and married
a wife. She was the daughter of a woman at whose
house he lodged, and her age was less than half of
his own. It is to be supposed he loved her.

A year after their marriage she fell into low health,
and her husband took her off to Lewminster for fresher
air. She was lodging alone at Lewminster, and
the man was passing Lewminster station on his engine,
twice a day, at the time when this tale begins.

People—­especially those who live in the
West of England—­remember the great fire
at the Lewminster Theatre; how, in the second Act of
the Colleen Bawn, a tongue of light shot from
the wings over the actors’ heads; how, even
while the actors turned and ran, a sheet of fire swept
out on the auditorium with a roaring wind, and the
house was full of shrieks and blind death; how men
and women were turned to a white ash as they rose
from their seats, so fiercely the flames outstripped
the smoke. These things were reported in the
papers, with narratives and ghastly details, and for
a week all England talked of Lewminster.

This engine-driver, as the 9.45 train neared Lewminster,
saw the red in the sky. And when he rushed into
the station and drew up, he saw that the country porters
who stood about were white as corpses.

“What fire is that?” he asked one.

“’Tis the theayter! There’s
a hundred burnt a’ready, and the rest treadin’
each other’s lives out while we stand talkin’,
to get ’pon the roof and pitch theirselves over!”